A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance by Jane Juska

At 67, Juska decided she’d been celibate for too long and put a personal ad in The New York Review of Books that read:
"Before I turn 67-next March-I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me."
Men answered, and her dates with them form of the outline of this raucous, refreshing memoir.
Buy it here.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Published in 1792, A Vindication is considered one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft argues that women ought to be educated and that they should be defined by their profession, not their partner.
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr

You can thank Karr for the onslaught of memoirs in recent years. The 1995 publication of The Liar’s Club, a moving account of Karr’s chaotic childhood in an east Texas oil town, is credited with reviving the form.
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Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Joyce Johnson

Aspiring writer Johnson found rich material for her first book when she fell in love with Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg. Here, she chronicles her relationship with Kerouac and the Beat movement.
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Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching by Paula J. Giddings

A worthy biography of Wells, who began her activist career by refusing to leave a first-class ladies’ car on a Memphis railway and rose to lead the nation’s first campaign against lynching.
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Georgia O’Keeffe by Roxana Robinson

Isak Dinesen by Judith Thurman

This biography explores writer Dinesen’s (_Out of Africa_) life-her priveleged but unhappy childhood in Denmark, her marriage to a Baron, their immigration to Africa on the eve of World War I and her passionate affair with Denys Finch Hatton.
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No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friendan

Friedan’s bestselling feminist book began as a questionnaire about women’s education, experiences and satisfaction with their lives, which she sent to her fellow Smith college graduates in 1957.
Buy it here.

Personal History by Katharine Graham

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Walls’s exuberant, unbelievable account of her nomadic childhood is striking, not just for the harsh living conditions favored by her parents (a charismatic drunk and an adventure-seeking artist), but for the love with which she tells their story. Buy it here.

CLICK HERE FOR THE TOP 100 BOOKS EVERY WOMAN SHOULD READ PART IV-POETRY